Key Points
Anna Faris tells EW she has “five drafts of an email to Keanu Reeves” that she “never had the courage to send” after parodying John Wick in the latest Scary Movie.
Faris’ hapless Cindy Campbell fights a horde of Ghostface killers “Ballerina style,” she says, at the film’s climax, which prompted her to (almost) relay her reverence for Reeves over email.
Scary Movie director Michael Tiddes describes the “amazing action scene for Anna’s character” as the film’s “crescendo,” which he hopes leaves viewers thinking, “‘Did that just happen?'”
She’s known as a comedy queen, a podcasting pioneer, and an arthouse darling. But Scary Movie makes a new argument for Anna Faris the action star.
For Entertainment Weekly‘s Scary Movie cover story, the returning protagonist of the first four entries in the horror parody franchise broke down all the films that co-creators and co-writers Shawn and Marlon Wayans set Faris up to knock down in the latest.
Following directly from 2000’s franchise kickstarter, Faris’ hapless, harmless Cindy Campbell has retreated to a remote backwater to lie in wait for the slasher that tried to take her life, following in the footsteps of the Halloween reboot trilogy’s inveterate final girl Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis). Then she’s reactivated by a new network of Ghostface killers á la Scream. Scary Movie (in theaters now) also contains parodies of Get Out, It Follows, Sinners, Smile, and more of the best horror releases of the last two decades.
But the Wayans didn’t draw the line at horror. Scary Movie also riffs on Wicked, KPop Demon Hunters, and even John Wick, the graphic action franchise starring a broody Keanu Reeves. It’s Cindy who takes on the avenging angel role in Scary Movie, kicking a horde of Ghostface killers’ butts in a high-octane fight sequence peppered with meta zingers about Faris’ desperate need for a stunt double. While Faris tells EW that she didn’t catch up on every single film that Scary Movie parodies, “John Wick felt like it was important. Actually, I have like five drafts of an email to Keanu Reeves saved on my phone as I was dressed up. I never had the courage to send it.”
Michael Tiddes directing Anna Faris in ‘Scary Movie’
Credit: Quantrell Colbert/Paramount
What would Faris have told the beloved actor, musician, and motorcycle manufacturing entrepreneur? “That I was ‘sitting in my cast chair dressed in this beautiful black suit that’s fitted well, and I’m attempting to carry a degree of intensity in my body that you deliver with your brilliance in John Wick.'”
“Something like that,” she shrugs, adding with a laugh, “I never thought this would happen. I’m 49.”
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Faris described shooting the John Wick parody as one of the most “incredible” of the entire Scary Movie revival experience. “To go from my origin story, getting sprayed to the ceiling — being a kind of hapless archetype, like, yes, Cindy survives, but does she deserve to? So to get to do that fight sequence, to return to the black wig, Ballerina style, it was a blast. I kept thanking [director Michael Tiddes]. I kept saying, ‘Thank you for letting Cindy win.'”
Tiddes tells EW that the scene was as “important” for him as it was for Faris. “Leading into the finale, it was important to kind of build into a crescendo. Then in the finale to pull it off the way we did, where you have this amazing action scene for Anna’s character, this real, true comeuppance with our Ghostface.”
Following the “big reveal in the end” — well, big reveals, which shouldn’t be a spoiler for anyone familiar with how the Scream franchise tends to end its films now — Tiddes says “my hope is that that is surprising to the audience and leaves them like, ‘What? Did that just happen?”
Anna Faris fighting Ghostface in the original ‘Scary Movie’
Credit: miramax
The very best part of Faris’ brief time as a world-class ass kicker? “I didn’t have to go to any stunt training. Turns out when they give you a gun, you don’t have to go learn a bunch of fights,” she jokes.
“I had actually acquired a bit of stunt training from the [previous Scary Movie films]. They were always sending me to, especially boxing, between boxing with a cat and doing that Million Dollar Baby parody. The river dance stuff,” Faris recounts. It felt to the Mom star that whoever it was at the helm of each Scary Movie would think to themselves, “She’s got the weekend off, let’s send her to some kind of training camp! Keep her in shape!“
Faris previously told EW that she accepted the offer to return to the Scary Movie fold as “the biggest gift of my career.” It was the “opportunity to properly thank [the Wayans] and show them that I am just in awe of them” that touched her the most. “The truth is, I’m just happy to be part of this journey.”
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
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